


Chimera

by ivarara



Series: Maxis [16]
Category: Warframe
Genre: chimera prologue spoilers!!!, heck ballas. heck you ballas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-14 22:44:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17517221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivarara/pseuds/ivarara
Summary: The events of the Chimera Prologue unfold.





	Chimera

It started with the whispers.

“Tenno…Tenno…”

It was her voice.

Max reflexively looks to the Lotus’ helm, stashed away on a shelf in her bunk, away from prying eyes. Only she and Zus knew about it.

But in its place was her doppelganger, the void demon.

“Haha!” They giggle as they sit with the helm on their head, imitating her voice. Their head is cocked to the side, jokingly laughing again.

Max feels a stab of upset through her heart—the Lotus was gone, but why was the demon here? She reaches to touch the helmet, to rid herself of the illusion.

It all snaps to black.  
-+-+-+-

She comes to on Lua.

Ivara is with her, now. She can’t tell if it’s still a hallucination, or if this is real.

She can’t find it in herself to care all that much at the moment.

Right now, her attention is drawn elsewhere—there, a black tendril, leading through the grand golden doors in front of her.

She follows it.

Again, the doppelganger appears, laughing as if it were all a game.

“Haha!”

Instinctively, she rushes to follow their form. Ivara keeps pace with her the whole way, Artemis Bow drawn and ready to protect if need be. But as she catches up to them, they vanish, dashing down the hallways and hiding behind corners and peeking out, giggling to themselves.

The black tendril follows in their wake. Max follows both.

As she catches up to them a second time, they laugh more sinisterly. A wall of flames erupts around her and Ivara, catching them both off-guard. She can’t get through; she can’t escape it.

Pure black, faceless shadows of the doppelganger emerge from the dancing flames, charging the two before they were ready. Max is quick to unholster her Argonak and pick off any that dare to get too close, while Ivara works alongside her seamlessly.

After a few seconds, they stop coming; the demons stop flowing from the fiery walls around them.

“Haha!”

Exasperated, Max darts to follow them again.

It happens twice more—the flames, the demons. The taunting, airy laughter.

Each time Max catches up to them, they dash away and chuckle to themselves, as if they were winning a game only they were playing.  
.  
Eventually, they reach the Reservoir. The room where it all started. Max feels another pang of hurt in her heart, almost fondly remembering the Lotus’ revelation from The Second Dream.

Stop it. She is no more, Max snaps to herself, catching her out of her daydreaming.

“Hehe!” The doppelganger laughs as they dart down the hole in the floor. Max runs ahead and follows them without thinking, leaving Ivara behind.  
-+-+-+-  
I remember this place.

Max comes to again, in the same room she first encountered the Lotus, face-to-face, and where she inevitably left her again, for Ballas.

Ballas. The name leaves a bitter taste in her mouth. She thinks back to the fights with Umbra, how he had finally prevailed over his tormentor and successfully pierced him with the Skiajati. 

She had assumed he’d been left for dead, too far gone before the Lotus—no, Natah—had found him.

The doppelganger shows up again, in the vast, purple hallway. The helmet is still donned on their head, and they dance mockingly, before clutching their stomach in laughter.

“I am not who you think I am.”

Her voice comes through again, a memory. The double dashes to the end of the hallway to laugh some more.

“But of course you are. Imprisoned, just as she was.”

Ballas’ voice cuts in through the haze of the memory.

“Hahaha!” The twin laughs yet again, and dashes to the pillar where the Lotus once stood.

Max races off after them.  
-+-+-+-  
This time, she comes to in a dark, dank tunnel. Towards the end, a sickly orange light emerges from a pale sun.

She dashes ahead through the tunnel.

“No…no…”

Ballas’ voice, again? She darts ahead to investigate.

“My beauty, my grace, my humanity…”

Max dashes out onto the scene, to slip behind one of the broken, twisted trees there.

Only…this wasn’t Ballas. This wasn’t Ballas at all. This…thing, this bent, contorted creature—this couldn’t be him, could it? With Sentient legs, still cradling his disfigured arm, this   
couldn’t be him.

But it was.

“H-hello?” The figure calls out. Max freezes, stops breathing. A pause. “No. No hope.” It continues, agony and misery writhing their way into its voice. Suddenly, a fierce, blinding white light shows from one of its eyes. In pain, it seems, it looks around for someone, something. 

“Ah…”

Max is terrified, still frozen, but she remembers to breathe. A slow breath. Trembling hands, leaned against the twisted tree branch.

“Only suffering under her eye.”

The beast is talking to itself, muttering under its breath.

“That she sees…she punishes!”

Punishes? The Lotus never did that, not while Max had followed her. She still couldn’t see her   
being one to punish.

“But…she gave me the gift of life! Why would I betray her?”

The gift of life? Had the Lotus—Natah—had they brought him back to life, as this disfigured, broken thing?

It reaches to the sky, calling down a shard of a blade to the pedestal beside it. It hovers, faintly blue, sinister.

“Fool! This…this is no gift!” It utters ruefully to itself. “She stole my death! My perfect death. Such is her power…over me. Over the devil!”

Again, it reaches to the sky, and calls down another shard.

“We saw what we wanted, those devils and I. A lover…a mother!”

Max feels the all too familiar pang of sorrow at the memory of the Lotus’ guiding hand, the way   
she had cared for her as a mother would.

The creature continues. “But now I know. She is neither. She’s a hawk—calling with sparrow’s song.”

Another shard called down.

“A viper, blending into wood. And her venom…spreads not into flesh, but into your heart.”  
Another, this time a fragment of what looked to be a hilt.

“Those devils!” It snarls. “What has their great awakening accomplished—but the destruction of potential allies? Don’t they see?”

Potential allies?

It calls down another fragment of the hilt.

“Love must die—as Margulis did when I sent her to the Jade light. And the Lotus…just a cloud in the sky, just some shape they imagined.”

No…Max wants to war with reason, to think, No, the Lotus wouldn’t betray her like this.  
But she had.

“Only the Sentient is real. Only Natah.”

The name makes her blood run cold.

A final fragment, called down and set into place.

“So…tell me, devil. Do you understand what must be done?”

Spoken directly to her. It knew she was there, cowering behind the tree. Upon being seen, the   
white light burns her skin, though it is quick to look away and grant her reprieve.

It approaches the fragments of what looks to be a sword. With its mangled twisted arm, it reaches out to grab the hilt. The pieces snap into place, the sword taking shape. The creature looks away, as if looking at it caused pain. “The Paracesis. The Sentient slayer.”

No…

“Hurry! Take this…the idea of it…it is the only way your war can end.”

She dashes up to the pedestal. Hesitantly, she reaches a hand out to grasp the hilt under where the creature’s gnarled hand remained wrapped around it. A surge of energy flows through her body, the echoes of her rushing to her head again.

“Tenno….tenno…”

With a final baleful glare, the creature stares straight at her.  
-+-+-+-  
She comes to back in her bunk, as if no time had passed. Trouvaille remains asleep at her feet, undisturbed. Ivara nods off from where she’s propped up on a few boxes next to the bunk. Her head throbs; her hands are still trembling.

Only a dream.

Or was it?


End file.
